t was Albert Einstein who stated it best: “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.” While the Templeton Foundation has never shied away from asking big scientific questions, with the formation of the Foundational Questions in Physics and Cosmology (FQXi), it significantly raises the ante, asking the brightest scientific minds from around the world to take on the biggest, most essential questions ever.

In the fall of 2005, physicists Max Tegmark and Anthony Aguirre announced the launch of FQXi before a crowd gathered to recognize the remarkable career of Charles Townes (Templeton Prize 2005). It was a fitting place to launch such an ambitious venture. Townes himself, considered the father of the modern laser, was surrounded by 17 of his fellow Nobel laureates. Each man’s work a symbol of the scientific understanding possible when difficult questions are answered in innovative ways.

It was in this spirit that Tegmark and Aguirre gave a presentation to the group about the kinds of questions FQXi is interested in answering. “One thing that was very clear from the meeting was that science has been spectacularly successful at answering many great questions,” says Tegmark. “But science has also been successful at raising new questions we hadn’t even stumbled upon before. There’s a great intellectual adventure ahead.”

FQXi’s mission is to fund pure science research not underwritten by other funding sources. “We’re looking for research projects that are too daring, too cutting-edge, too risky,” says co-founder Aguirre. “Projects that border on philosophical issues.”

How philosophical? FQXi grantees will not only investigate the pressing scientific questions of our time, but also age-old questions that have befuddled thinkers before science was a recognized discipline. The four-year program will fund several dozen grants that investigate questions including the nature of time, the likelihood of other universes and how complexity arises from simple initial conditions, among others.

For a more complete understanding of what FQXi is doing, we visited with Aguirre and Tegmark.